The goal of cancer treatment is to selectively inhibit or eliminate the growth of malignant cells while leaving normal tissue intact. Transcriptionally targeted anti-cancer therapy employs an elegant approach to selectively destroy cancer cells by placing a cytotoxic gene/oncolytic virus under transcriptional control of cancer specific promoters. To date several attempts to design such systems have been made. For example, the telomerase RNA subunit hTER and catalytic subunit hTERT (Abdul-Ghani R, et al. (2000) Mol Ther 2: 539-44; Koga S, et al. (2000 Hum Gene Ther 11: 1397-406; Komata T, et al. (2001) Cancer Res 61: 5796-802; Kirch H C, et al. (2002) Oncogene 21: 7991-8000; Majumdar A S, et al. (2001) Gene Ther 8: 568-78; Gu J, et al. (2000) Cancer Res 60: 5359-64, tyrosinase (Nettelbeck D M, et al. (2002) Cancer Res 62: 4663-70), prostate antigen (Latham et al. (2000) Cancer Res 60: 334-41), survivin (Chen J S, et al. (2004) Cancer Gene Ther 11: 740-7), and midkine genes (Yu L, et al. (2004) Eur J Cancer 40: 1787-94) have been proposed for use in transcriptional targeting of cancers. However, limitations of these promoters include insufficient expression of therapeutic genes, leaky expression resulting in toxicity to normal cells, and narrow specificity to a particular tumor type. Thus, there is an ongoing need to provide improved compositions and methods suitable for use in transcriptional targeting of cancer cells. The present invention meets this need.